Modern cultural studies may focus on ways in which people create their own meanings out of mass culture, but in the days of the Frankfurt school, this was a whole other kettle of culturally determined fish. For these guys, it had become pretty clear that the social revolution Marx had prophesized wasn't happening, and that capitalism—and the class inequality that accompanied it—was doing just fine, thank you very much.
Adorno and Horkheimer set out to discover why this was the case, and ended up pointing the finger of blame squarely at mass culture. Dialectic of Enlightenment is key reading for anyone interested in the reasoning and politics that were at the heart of the Frankfurt school and its condemnation of the mass media and group mentality in larger society.
So here's some questions: why did Adorno and Horkheimer have such beef with mass culture? If it wasn't just snobbery, what was it? Also, what have they got against pleasure? Do they understand it differently than other fun-lovin' folk, or is there another reason they insist on disrupting it?